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10/26/2015

New Jersey bedroom producer and Ryan Hemsworth pal Dan Casey put out his debut EP as dd elle, the unassumingly titled u, last month. It’s a release that could easily slide under the radar — everything about it feels self-consciously small,
from its title to its runtime to Casey’s shy, pitch-shifted vocals —
but it’s one that’s absolutely worthy of your time. Today, he’s just
shared a new video for EP track “a note,” actually one of the first dd
elle songs to be released all the way back in early 2014. Directed by
Cameron Reed, the clip is composed entirely of the results of a stock
footage search for “people smiling,” save for one brief shot of an
unsmiling Casey at the end. The track itself sounds like a dazed
sunbeam, and Casey’s meek and occasionally unintelligible vocals don’t
draw much attention to his actual words, but the scrolling
singalong-style text in the video highlights the dissonance between the
daydreamy sonics and the seriously fucked up, suicidal lyrics: “I feel
like jumping in front of something/ I feel like being destroyed/ I feel
like taking my final sigh/ I feel like leaving a note.” Combined with
the images of happy, smiling faces, the end result is something stuck in
an odd space between deeply comforting and deeply disturbing, or maybe
both at once.